People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast

Why are there only jobs on the coast?

I think this is the real root of the problem. Everybody wants to cram into (for example) Silicon Valley - because it's where the best paying, most stable jobs are. Why can't these employers employ workers elsewhere. I've actually worked for a company that tried that tactic. Guess what? During hard times, (or mergers), they tend to shut remote sites down, and the workers are laid off or uprooted.

But yeah - a lot of problems would be resolved if employment were more distributed.

...and you didn't. The text you quoted neither says nor implies that that's a traditional strength. (In the text you quoted, the word traditional is used as an adjective modifying "languages".)

I used Familiar Linux back in the day, when my Compaq iPaq became little more than a paperweight. When it was new, I had bought the iPaq with the battery sleeve that had 2 PCMCIA card slots. I did use it for a couple things. One was a little wifi scan tool, kind a primitive Wifi Analyzer. The other was the fancy IR remote that you mentioned.

Since it was so limited, even though it was a little Linux box, it eventually just ended up sitting on my desk until the batteries died, and a few years later it end up in a box in the closet. I haven't seen it in a few years, so it got misplaced one of the times I've moved. No big loss, other than the huge amount I had paid for it when it was new.

Since I can do everything with my Android phone that I ever did with the iPaq, there really isn't a reason to even try to resurrect one.

Their consumer drives have gone to absolute shit. I was buying them because they were marginally cheaper than the other choices. I ended up with a couple dozen running over the period of about a year. As each matured to about 1.5 years old, they started dying. Seagate reduced their warranty for consumer drives down to 1 year, so now they're all paperweights.

I guess they're ok, if you want to build a computer that you only want to use for 1 year. Maybe building out a machine for someone you don't like, or you like repeat business from angry customers who lose all their data yearly.

One of these days, we're going to have a thermite fueled funeral pyre. I'll post the YouTube video. :)

At least these "archive" drives get a 3 year warranty, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they start trimming that down over time as they find out what their real failure rates are like.

I've only ever been asked once, over countless flights before and after 9/11. That was in 2000, to board a flight leaving the US for Europe. Unfortunately, I was using it on the first flight, and my battery died. I told the agent "The battery is dead, but I can plug it in if you'd show me where an outlet is". That was the end of it.

Thus spake sexconker, on advertising-supported Slashdot, which he has been reading and posting to for five years.

It wouldn't have "seeped out", but you're on the right track. hydrogen + oxygen + energy = water. and water + energy = hydrogen + oxygen. We understand a lot of the surface chemical processes on this planet. We don't understand all the subterranean processes, but we have an idea.

Non-terrestrial bodies can carry water. Landing on a single comet and saying "no comets have Earth-like water" is like saying "We've only found life on Earth, therefore no other life exists."

I think some people have a very homogenous view of the universe. Once you've sampled a few, you've sampled them all.

Even on the Earth, there isn't a lot of water. This may give a better visualization.

http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html

In practice, a certificate is nothing more than a long password

Fail. A certificate contains a public key. This is nothing like a password. You're thinking of a private key. The whole point of a certificate is that you can prove your identity to someone without sending them your password.

Unlike the password in somebody's head or even on a sticky note behind the monitor, these certificate files can often be stolen remotely!

Double fail. Firstly, nobody actually steals certificates. Certificates are public. When someone says something was signed with a "stolen cert", what they actually mean is "stolen private key the public part of which is contained in a certificate signed by a trusted third party", but that's a mouthful, so we simply and say "stolen cert".

Secondly, private keys can and absolutely should be protected with a password! Or they can be kept in special hardware. However, as you may have noticed, Sony got pwned pretty hard so presumably whatever private key was stolen either had no password, or they were able to just keylog the password when it was used.

These people are a joke.

The joke is on you ..... certificates are not a replacement for passwords and if you think they are, you didn't understand what they're used for.